Hitchcock was only 28 years old when he directed The Ring, but this was already the young filmmaker's fourth film. Hitchcock regularly attended boxing matches in London where he lived and he was struck by the fact that a good number of the spectators appear from good backgrounds and dressed in white. He also noticed that fighters were sprinkled with champagne at the end of each round. It was these two details that persuaded the young Hitchcock to start work on The Ring.

After directing Downhill and Easy Virtue, two stage adaptations for the Gainsborough company, Hitchcock was frustrated and jumped at the chance to develop an idea of his own. Surprisingly, The Ring is Hitchcock's one and only original screenplay, although he worked extensively alongside other writers throughout his career. Colleagues at the studio were impressed by the neatness of his script and its writer's grasp of structure. What's more, writing for silent films came naturally to a director who already thought in visual terms. He was much less comfortable with dialogue, which goes some way to explain why he took no sole writing credit in any later films.

The film, while widely considered a minor work[citation needed], features photography tricks Hitchcock would use again years later in films like The Man Who Knew Too Much, most notably during the climactic boxing sequences.

The film's title refers not only to the boxing arena, but also to the wedding ring – and to a suggestive snake bracelet which becomes a symbol of the love triangle at the center of the film. The story revolves around a love triangle between a fairground boxer (Jack "One Round" Sander – Carl Brisson) whose lover (Mabel – Lillian Hall-Davis) falls for the charms of a professional boxer (Bob Corby – Ian Hunter).